Jack Rushton - BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts

Thursday 27 October 2016

Louise Nevelson Research

Louise Nevelson is an American sculptor and artist born at the end of the 19th century. She is best known for her monochromatic wall pieces and outdoor scultpures inspired by cubism and abstract impressionist art that emerged in america in the early 20th century.

Nevelson's career started in 1929 where she studied full time under the famous artists Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides. Following this Nevelson moved to Europe and continued to study. After moving back to America it was the 1930s when she would begin studying the art of sculptures and begin to start exhibiting her work on the subject. In the beginning of the 1940s is when Nevelson began her solo exhibitions due to her experience and impressive portfolio of work being represented by Karl Nierendorf. It was in this time period that she began experimenting with different materials to produce cubist figures.

It was the 1950s when Nevelson's work started to increase in scale progressing past human-scale sized sculptures. Her work in this period was largely remembered for being painted black and their large scales. The start of the 1960s is where Nevelson saw a dip in a career having a badly reviewed exhibition and a falling out with the gallery owner whose gallery she exhibitied her work at resulting in years of legal disputes following. However later in the decade her fame as an artist saw a resurgence with a gallery displaying a retroactive exhibition of her work. Following on from this she continued to expirement with even more materials such as alluminium, plastic and metal. Some of her work in this period used discarded materials that she found to have an abstract shape, from which she then created a sculpture to represent atmosphere and environment.